The battle's done, and we kind of won, so we sound our victory cheer: where do we go from here?
... a blog by Marc Lynch

February 11, 2005

Egyptian opposition updates

Saad Eddin Ibrahim has a nice piece in the Washington Post today. He asks a series of very pointed questions of Hosni Mubarak, and then concludes with this:

Western countries owe Egypt's budding democratic
movement their attention and support. I was dismayed by the faint "we
take note'" reaction of State Department spokesman Richard Boucher to
Nour's arrest and the trumped-up charges against him. There are
hundreds of dissidents like Nour in Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia --
the three countries that are at the hard core of Arab authoritarianism.

President Bush has repeated that the United States will
stand by those who work for freedom in their countries. Scores of
courageous Arab dissidents have taken a stand for freedom, and many
face pending trials or have spent years in prison. But the United
States has yet to be heard from in their defense.

What we have so far from George W. Bush is fine
language in his inaugural and State of the Union speeches. That message
was loud and clear. The credibility of the messenger is what is still
in doubt.

A well written, eloquent piece. But it makes interesting reading against the current issue of the Al Ahram Weekly, which has a number of interesting reports on Hizb al Ghad and the Kifaya movement in Egypt. Amira Howeidy reports from a Kifaya demonstration at the Cairo International Book Fair, offering a nicely textured account:

"Leave!" the group of approximately 50 demonstrators belonging to the Popular Campaign for Change screamed -- " Kifaya ! Haram
!" (Enough! It's too much!). For two-hours they chanted a variety of
political slogans denouncing political repression, financial
corruption, police brutality, poverty and normalisation with Israel.
Their most popular chant, by far, was "Enough!" Reiterated dozens of
times, with the same forcefulness and zeal, it immediately harked back
to a popular slogan chanted in Egyptian football stadiums, and seemed a
simple summation of a serious political sentiment at the same time. The
word also translated eloquently into English, its nuances ensuring easy
conveyance of the symbolic message to much more than just a domestic
constituency.

Unfortunately, Howeidy observes the all too common dangers of international attention, the "kiss of death" phenomenon which is one of the great costs of the anti-Americanism which has spiked during the Bush administration:

International, and particularly American, media attention has been
a double-edged sword, or possibly a kiss of death, as far as the local
activists are concerned, however. Spotlighting their demands and
various forms of activism, it also lays them open to the charge of
providing a pretext for foreign intervention in Egyptian domestic
affairs. One such activist, psychiatry professor Aida Seif El-Dawla, is unhappy with the attention. "Editorials like the one in the New York Times interpret what we do as a message to Bush," she told Al-Ahram Weekly,
"which is absolutely not the case. If they were listening to what we've
been saying, they would know we are also against imperialism in all its
forms." The attention has had its backlash at home, Seif El-Dawla said,
with "pro-government newspapers and magazines using these editorials to
question the Enough movement's patriotism".

The US's reaction to Nour's arrest has also rankled the party. The
US State Department issued a statement "deploring [Nour's] arrest and
calling on the government to re-examine the issue". A Washington Post
editorial described him as being "the sort of future leader capable of
winning broad support". According to the newspaper, it was "that, and
not forgery, [which] landed him in jail".

Several leading party members reacted to the US stance by publicly
voicing their rejection of any external interference in Nour's case.
Forty party members from Al-Qalyubiya were provoked into submitting
their resignations last Thursday. In a statement bearing their
signatures, they criticised "Nour's dealings with the US at a time when
he [himself] harshly criticised anyone who deals with the US". One of
the party's senior founders, Sherif Esmat Abdel-Meguid, son of the
former Arab League secretary-general, also submitted his resignation.

The party's connection to the US became a hot topic of debate last
December, when US ambassador to Cairo David Welch visited Nour at his
residence. "As a liberal party, calling for an open relationship with
the West and the US," Ismail said, "it was very natural to meet the US
ambassador." She said it was Welch who asked to meet Nour to
congratulate him on the formation of the party and find out more about
its programme. "As a precautionary measure, Nour decided to notify
Shura Council speaker Safwat El- Sherif about the Welch meeting in
accordance with the political parties law," Ismail said.

Finally, the paper interviews Mona Makram Ebeid. Among her remarks:

We are all against the present US administration's heavy-handed
admonitions to reform. We want reform to be a homegrown effort. The US
would help the reform cause best by vigorously pursuing a just
settlement of the Palestinian- Israeli conflict, and bringing an end to
the Iraqi occupation....

What they [Americans] are saying now about reform, [Egyptian]
reformers have been saying for the past 20 years, but no one was
listening. It was more in their interest to support dictators like
Saddam Hussein.

Notice a theme here?

To be clear, I don't really have an answer to this dilemma. I do think that the US should support genuine reformists and the rights of political opposition movements. But I also recognize the political backlash which inevitably follows.

At any rate, be sure to follow the Arabist Network's ongoing coverage of these issues - and I'd be curious to know two things from Charles, Josh, or Issandr: do you have any comments on the Al Ahram Weekly reporting? And, how has the Arabic language Egyptian press (not just the state-owned media, but the tabloids) been covering these stories?

UPDATE: asked, and answered: go check out responses by Issandr and Josh - really interesting stuff. No chance to comment myself right now, 'cause it's Sunday and the cub is playful!

Comments

Thank you for putting this on your blog. Thank you for the pictures above, too. I write letters per Amnesty and Human Rights to Mr. Mubarak re political prisoners; I hope it helps. I only wish that I could believe that writing similar missives to George W. made any difference.